Vietnam Completes Voting in One-Party Legislative Election

Voters cast their ballots at a polling station set up at a temple in downtown Hanoi. Photographer: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP/Getty Images

May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Vietnam held elections yesterday for
the National Assembly, part of a process designed to demonstrate
citizen participation in a state where the ruling Communist
Party does not allow political opposition.

Results in the vote last held in 2007, which may involve as
many as 500 seats, will probably be available within a week,
Pham Minh Tuyen, general secretary of the National Election
Council, said by telephone. The Communist Party has ruled the
country of 87 million people since the U.S.-backed government of
South Vietnam lost the civil war in 1975.

“The Vietnamese government feels compelled to call their
system democratic and to hold elections to try to tell the rest
of the world that their version of democracy is just different
from others,” Raymond Burghardt, a former U.S. ambassador to
Vietnam and now director of seminars at the East-West Center in
Honolulu, said in a telephone interview. “But the essence of
this political system is that no alternative centers of power
will be permitted to emerge.”

Included among the 827 contestants for positions as
National Assembly deputies are 117 non-members of the Communist
Party as well as 15 self-nominated candidates, according to a
government election website. The Communist Party is the only
legal political party in Vietnam, and all non-Party candidates
are running as individuals.

Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs including Dang Thanh Tam, chairman of Kinh
Bac City Development Share Holding Corp. and one of the
country’s richest people, also participated. The majority of
candidates are nominated by Party-controlled institutions.

The National Assembly last year rejected a proposed $56
billion high-speed rail line that had government backing and a
call was made for a confidence vote on Prime Minister Nguyen Tan
Dung, which was never held.

“The National Assembly does have more of a role than it
used to, and you get a certain amount of frank discussion
there,” Burghardt said.

In the 2007 election, 10 percent of those elected were non-Party members, and one was self-nominated, according to Edmund
Malesky, an assistant professor at the University of California
in San Diego who specializes in Vietnamese politics. Still, all
candidates must pass through a vetting process to make it onto
the ballot, he said.

“This is certainly not going to be an election that you
would see in a Western parliamentary system but there is a
certain amount of competition that’s allowed because it’s useful
for Party leaders,” he said.

Little Instability

While the Vietnamese system is characterized by very low
levels of citizen participation and of government accountability,
there is also minimal risk of political instability similar to
that seen recently in North Africa and the Middle East, Moody’s
Investors Service said in April.

Vietnam’s political stability is a result of rising wealth,
employment prospects and increasing economic openness, according
to Moody’s, which said that leadership transitions in the
country are conducted largely behind closed doors.

The country’s economy has averaged 7 percent growth over
the past decade, and per-capita income has more than quadrupled
since the mid-1990s. Vietnam concluded a trade agreement with
the U.S. in 2001 that has led to a 14-fold jump in American-bound shipments within a decade, and the country joined the
World Trade Organization in 2007.

Still, the country’s economy is faced with the fastest
inflation in more than two years, and with foreign exchange
reserves that declined 46 percent between the end of 2008 and
the end of 2010, according to the World Bank.

“We need people who are good at economic issues,” said
78-year-old Dam Trung Don, in an interview after voting in Hanoi
yesterday.